On the trail of the Unabomber.

Survivors See Little Sense Behind The Terror

Unabomber's Victims Search Their Memories For Links To The Suspect

April 05, 1996|By Gary Marx and Andrew Martin, Tribune staff writers.

At the beginning of the bloody and seemingly quixotic trail of the Unabomber stands a man with a question:

"If you've been involved in something like this, you really want to know why," said Buckley Crist, the Northwestern University material science professor whose name appeared on the return address of the first bomb attributed to the Unabomber. The bomb slightly injured the security officer who opened it in 1978.

It is the same question asked by John Hauser, whose dreams of becoming an astronaut ended in 1985 with a Unabomber blast that threw his Air Force Academy ring into a wall so hard its lettering made a legible impression.

Diogenes Angelakos asks it, too. He tied a makeshift tourniquet around Hauser's arm moments after the blast. Angelakos' own right hand had been injured by another of the Unabomber's packages less than three years before.

There were few answers Thursday for these survivors of the Unabomber's nearly 18-year campaign of violence--and the families of those who died--as Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski was arraigned in a Montana courtroom on a felony charge of possessing bomb components.

That left the victims to pick through the details of their lives in search of threads, however frayed, that might somehow connect them to Kaczynski, the brilliant mathematician, mountain man and mysterious figure the FBI believes killed three people and injured almost two dozen.

Only one target, Vanderbilt University computer science professor Patrick Fischer, believes he may have crossed paths with Kaczynski, and that was in a college math class more than 30 years ago.

Others say they are relieved that the years of vague unease, of carefully scrutinizing their mail and peering suspiciously at strangers, finally may be over. Still, they are puzzled.

"I've thought about it a lot but I still don't know why it happened," said Percy Wood, the former president of United Airlines, who was injured June 10, 1980, in the fourth explosion attributed to the Unabomber. "I've never heard the guy's name. I never saw him before."

Wood, who is 75 and lives in Florida, suffered burns and cuts over much of his body when he opened a package left in the mailbox of his Lake Forest home. The bomb was rigged inside a book, "Ice Brothers," about the crew of a Coast Guard vessel off Greenland in World War II.

The Unabomber is believed to be fascinated with wood, sometimes encasing his bombs in wood, and may have chosen Wood in part for his name.

It was among the oddest of the Unabomber's 19 attacks, littered with the seductive and obscure clues that would lead authorities down hundreds of dead ends before they took Kaczynski into custody Wednesday at his Lincoln, Mont., cabin.

Last month, as the FBI closed in on Kaczynski, they revisited at least four of the Unabomber's targets to show them color photographs of several men, including the 53-year-old loner who was raised in southwest suburban Evergreen Park.

Fischer, the head of Vanderbilt University's computer sciences department, didn't recognize Kaczynski but became curious when agents gave him a brief biography of the man.

Both men studied mathematics in Cambridge, Mass., in the early 1960s. Fischer, who was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took a course called "Computational Linguistics" at Harvard University in 1962, the same year Kaczynski got his math degree from Harvard.

"It's conceivable that we took a course together, but I don't know for sure," said Fischer, who is 62. "We could have overlapped as students. I don't remember the name or the face."

Also, Fischer's father, Carl Fischer, taught mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and shared an office with Cecil J. Nesbitt, a Michigan professor who read Kaczynski's doctoral thesis and recommended him for a departmental award.

Patrick Fischer was giving a series of lectures in Puerto Rico when a package addressed to him arrived at his Nashville office on May 5, 1982. Fragments from the pipe bomb hidden inside cut his secretary, Janet Smith, as she opened it, but she recovered from her injuries.

For several years, Fischer and his family went into "defensive mode." They always locked the doors and screened their mail but eventually learned to live with the persistent fear that the Unabomber might attack again.

"I was cautious but I was never paranoid," Fischer said. "It's great if they finally got this guy, and they get a conviction. He's basically a serial killer."

The first person killed by the Unabomber was 38-year-old Hugh Scrutton, a Sacramento, Calif., computer store owner who picked up a block of wood behind his shop on Dec. 11, 1985. It exploded, spewing shrapnel into his chest and up to 150 yards away.